ment-owned, commercial firms) was by multinational firms in the mid-1990s while in Malaysia only 10% of private sector investment from multinationals. Foreign firms were concentrated in the agricultural chemical and livestock sub-sectors; i.e., those with the highest growth rates (Pray and Fuglie, 2001).
         In SSA, only 2% of total agricultural R&D is conducted by the private sector.3 Almost two-thirds of the region's pri­vate research was done in South Africa. Most firms in SSA have few research staff with low total spending and they focus on crop improvement research, often export crops (Beintema and Stads, 2006).4 Similarly as in the Asian re­gion, multinationals and locally owned companies play a similarly important role. Given the tenuous market reali­ties facing much of African agriculture, it is unrealistic to expect marked and rapid development of locally conducted private R&D. Yet there may be substantial potential for tap­ping into private agricultural R&D done elsewhere through creative public-private joint venture arrangements (Osgood, 2006).
       In 2000, total investments in all sciences conducted by the public and private sectors combined were over $700 billion (in 2000 international prices) (Table 8-4). The re­gional shares in the global total differ substantially from the shares in agricultural R&D spending. Industrialized coun­tries combined accounted for about 80% of total science and technology (S&T) spending while SSA's share was less than one percent. There are also considerable differences in the shares of public and private agricultural R&D spending in total S&T spending. Agricultural R&D spending in SSA accounted for more than one-third of the region's total sci-
3 The private sector does, however, play a stronger role in funding agricultural research, as opposed to performing research itself. Many private companies contract government and higher-educa­tion agencies to perform research on their behalf. 4 Examples are cotton in Zambia and Madagascar and sugar cane in Sudan and Uganda.

ence spending while in the other regions in the developing world these shares were considerably lower (9 to 12%). In the industrialized world spending in agricultural R&D was only 4% of the total S&T investments.

8.1.1.3 Intensity of research
In order to place a country's agricultural R&D efforts in an internationally comparable context, measures other than absolute levels of expenditures and numbers of researchers are needed, e.g., the intensity of investments in agricultural research. The most common research intensity indicator is a measure of total public agricultural R&D spending as a percentage of agricultural output (AgGDP).5 The industrial­ized countries as a group spent $2.36 on public agricultural R&D for every $100 of agricultural output in 2000, a large increase over the $1.41 they spent per $100 of output two decades earlier, but slightly down from the 1991 estimate of $2.38 (Figure 8-4). This longer-run increase in research intensity is in stark contrast to the group of developing countries; this group has seen no measurable growth in the intensity of agricultural research since 1981. In 2000, the developing world spent just 53 cents on agricultural R&D for every $100 of agricultural output. Agricultural output grew much faster in the developing countries as a group than in the industrialized countries. As a result, intensity ratios remained fairly stable for the developing regions as a group despite overall higher growth rates in agricultural R&D spending in the developing countries, and the inten­sity gap between rich and poor countries has widened over the years. More than half of the industrialized countries for
Some exclude for-profit private agricultural research expen­ditures when forming this ratio, presuming that such spending is directed toward input and postharvest activities that are not reflected in AgGDP. For reasons of consistency with these other studies, we excluded national and multinational private compa­nies (but not nonprofit institutions) from the calculated intensity ratios.